


An Excellent Plan

by Phlyarologist



Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: Drunkenness, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2019-09-19 12:24:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17001609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/pseuds/Phlyarologist
Summary: Bunny practices some light subterfuge. Raffles is unappreciative.





	An Excellent Plan

The idea first came to me in the Turkish bath. I had been lying motionless for some time in an effort to dispel one of the headaches that meant Raffles had once again overpowered my better judgment and my objections the night before. I resented that he had played me yet again, that he had yet again gotten his way, and that he was at that moment miles away on a heist he had somehow convinced me was not my concern. His reasoning had seemed all but unassailable in the more impressionable state I had occupied twelve hours earlier. In the unforgiving light of day, however, I apprehended all too quickly the truth that he did not trust me. He had laughed off every flaw I had seen in his plan, and he did not want me along.

And yet in that moment, there was one thing I resented most of all. Petty as it might seem, it was that Raffles never had to endure these things as I did. He had, I was certain, never been made to suffer through the condition that presently afflicted me.

Someone opened a newspaper nearby, and it was all I could do not to cringe at the assault on my delicate senses. Raffles, I thought. It was Raffles who had put me in this position, with a suspiciously liberal pour and odd insinuations that I was not devious enough to keep pace. My ire rose up afresh at the recollection. “Is that so,” I said under my breath. “Not devious enough, _indeed._ ”

It occurred to me even as the words left my lips - drawing, I must add, some peculiar stares from my most immediate neighbors - that I could prove him wrong. Moreover, it was possible that in doing so I could prevent his ever doing this to me again. If I was his accomplice, an accomplice I was determined to be; I would not be cast off in this manner, left to worry and sweat out a hangover in London. Raffles might have been a student of manipulation, but I was a student of Raffles. As such, I would be able to demonstrate to him once and for all that I was not so guileless as he believed.

Thus it was just over a week later that I found myself in the company of a very different A.J. Raffles - a Raffles more discomposed and more expansive than I had ever seen him before. He was, in short, exceedingly drunk. I had rightly predicted that his generally abstemious habits would leave him ill-defended against such an onslaught. I merely needed to keep him distracted so that he did not know how long we had been drinking. Daunting though the task had initially seemed, I had soon hit upon an effective stratagem. It consisted in the main of asking how he had managed this job or that, and subsequently not interrupting.

“Why, Bunny,” he said, smiling that unbearable smile, “I rather hoped you’d ask.”

It was an excellent plan. I believed that once I had got him onto the topic of his own incredible cunning and prowess, he would be unable to resist sharing details of crimes yet to come - details to which I would not otherwise have been privy. Withholding information from me, even information concerning my own prospects of survival from one job to the next, was like a game to him. I wished to make it clear that I no longer intended to play.

It was an excellent plan, as I say, but it had one flaw. It depended on my ability to listen calmly to anything he told me. I had made a good showing at first, but before long felt myself unequal to the task of hearing him smugly declaim on all the times we might have been arrested or killed and I’d never suspected a thing, the times he might have been arrested or killed and I had never even known he was gone, and those occasions on which keeping me in the dark had been an absolute necessity, as would become clear to me if I would only calm down. Nearly any event for which I thought I had the full story, he now gleefully turned on its ear. I cannot say whether he was more delighted by revealing the extent of his deceit or observing my indignation at the same. I can only say that his laughter was intolerable.

I was not as intoxicated as he, but suffice it to say that neither of us was fit to be seen in public. He had just concluded another self-congratulatory anecdote, and was sprawled inelegantly in a chair by the fire, one foot on the ottoman, his head thrown back in transports of mirth.

“You’ve really outdone yourself, A.J.,” I said, and my tone was lost on him.

“A trifle,” he said, “the merest bagatelle,” but his grin was so wide and so inordinately full of teeth that I knew he would never suffer me to believe as much. “Why, comparatively… Do you recall the crib we cracked in the second week of June?”

“No. I recall no such thing, because I was never there.” I recalled the previous June, in fact, as one of the most tedious and uneventful of my adult life. Raffles had told me he was biding his time.

For a moment his smile wavered, and he blinked at me as if only just apprehending that I was there. “Are you certain of that?”

I had a thought of breaking my glass over his head. Instead I said, “Utterly.”

“Odd. I might have sworn you were with me.” He leaned forward and ruminated on this for some while, but soon resumed the previous insufferable smirk. “Ah, that’s right, that was the time I fobbed you off with that story about -”

“Oh, get on with it.” He only chuckled. “Never mind. I can guess for myself how it happened. First you lied to me, and then you went on and did some other brilliantly unscrupulous thing, and it all went so much more smoothly without me. Is that what you meant to say?”

“What nonsense! What utter nonsense. In fact…” He stopped for several long seconds, and when he resumed he sounded surprised by his own words. “In point of fact, Bunny, I think I never told you about that night because I never got away with anything. It wasn’t a one-man job after all.”

To me this seemed an interesting reversal. It was far more often the case, in my experience, that he deemed something a two-man job only to discover that he required nothing of me at all, save perhaps to stand around growing increasingly bewildered and indignant. I cannot testify to my exact words, but I believe I insinuated as much to him.

“Why, Bunny, don’t be absurd!” he said. “You must know I couldn’t do it without you.”

“Without a patsy?”

For once he did not react to my truculence with the usual amusement. His expression all at once became unwontedly grave. “Not just any patsy will do, my dear rabbit.”

“I should think not. For all of your schemes, you must need one of uncommon stupidity.” I stared at him defiantly over my glass. “Suppose I were no longer inclined to do you that service - what then?”

“Now, now, that’s quite enough of that.” He had adopted a chiding tone that raised my hackles even more, and which his slightly slurred speech contrived to make all the more insulting. “Do you want to know what happened that night, or don’t you?”

“I hardly think I care.”

“Bunny.” He shook his head in disbelief or disapproval. _“Bunny.”_

“What?” I said coldly.

There was a long silence, and he frowned. “I don’t know. What was I saying?”

“I believe you were explaining what you would do without me.”

He leaned forward and gave me a searching, though slightly unfocused, look. “Do you know, I don’t believe I was.”

“Fine. You needn’t start trusting me now, of all times. Heaven knows you’ve done well enough thus far without it.”

“That’s not true. I trust you more than anyone. You can’t imagine, old… old…” He lost some time there fumbling for an appropriate noun. “Old thing, how completely I rely on your…”

“Naivety, perhaps?”

“Constancy.” He was not much given to gesticulation under ordinary circumstances, but here cast himself backward in his chair and made sweeping motions with his hands. “Your Bunny-ness, your quintessentially lapine nature.” He started laughing again. “Your delightful inability to concoct a plausible alias.”

“Now, see here -”

“Wait.” He held up a finger to stop me, looking suddenly serious again. “Something is not right here. Something is not as it should be.” The realization came to him but slowly - but when it did, the indignation on his face was something I knew I should prize forever. “I believe I'm _drunk.”_ It took a few moments more before he decided where to lay the blame. “What have you done to me?”

I could not help grinning at the childish anger in his tone. How odd to be the one holding this position for a change. “Oh, you should know perfectly well,” I said. “You were there the whole time.” He scowled ferociously at me, but I was beyond being cowed by his influence. I assumed my very best Raffles impression and the most nonchalant lounging posture I could manage. “Do you mean to say you haven’t worked it out yet? It was no trick at all for someone of my aptitudes.”

“That’s quite enough,” he said sharply. I only laughed at him, as he had at me. I had succeeded. I had caught him unawares and made some small retribution for my pains, and the remarkable ill grace with which he bore it was a sort of vindication in itself. “Stop that at once.” I did not stop. “I trusted you,” he said with an air of profound betrayal.

At this, I could no longer be so amused. I remembered the larger part of why I had done this in the first place. “Did you?”

“Haven’t I spent the whole blasted night saying as much?”

“You’ve spent the whole blasted night congratulating yourself, actually.”

Raffles groaned and put his head in his hands. “Why would you do this? What were you thinking?”

“There’s no need to be so dramatic. A few moments ago, you didn’t seem to mind at all.”

“I live or die by my wits and my will, Bunny.” From his former ebullience, through a fleeting wrath, he had now passed into a state that was nearly despondent. “I cannot have either of them diminished.” He raised his eyes again and looked at me grimly. “You live by my wits as well, so I can’t imagine what profit there is for you in this exercise.”

I was incensed, at first, at the implication that I made no contribution to my own life and livelihood. I had always suspected Raffles saw it that way, and it was distasteful to have this suspicion confirmed. It grew more distasteful as I considered the fact that he might be correct. His schemes provided for the both of us and, all too often, I seemed to have no part in them at all. It was some moments before I was able to shake off this conviction and recall my initial purpose. I had done this with an eye partly to paying Raffles back, yes, but partly to see to it I would not be so easily left out in the future. “The profit to me, Raffles, is simple. You see, I have managed to overpower you -”

“Steady on, old brick, I think that’s putting it a little strongly.”

“It is _not.”_

Raffles scoffed and made several false starts at a rejoinder, but in the end found no convincing response to this most eloquent and well-argued assertion.

“My plan was that you would be either too impressed with my cunning or too generally addled to resist.” Thus, quite satisfied with myself, I lay back in my chair again.

“To resist what?”

“Telling me what we’re doing next!” I said. I felt as though that should have been obvious. “Whom will we be robbing? What needlessly elaborate disguise will you wear? How many people will end up violently assaulted by the end of the night, and are any of them me? Where will we find the boodle, and what is it, how do you mean to carry it all off?”

He blinked at me slowly.

“I mean to be fully informed, Raffles, and I intend… I intend for once to be an equal partner, whether you like it or not. Indeed all evidence thus far is that you _don’t_ like it, but to that I say ha!” In case he had not yet got my point, I helpfully added, “Because I don’t care what you like.”

He was silent for nearly a minute, during which time I was repeatedly tempted to say something myself. But I remained resolute, knowing that if I said another word he might find a way to twist his way out of this. Eventually he sighed and said, “It simply isn’t as fun when it’s not surprising, Bunny. But very well. I can see how serious you are about this, damn you.” Whereupon he lit a Sullivan and told me everything. 

I omit the precise details here, against the possibility I may wish to write of that job another time. But it was a most elegant and effective plan, and I told him so.

He seemed pleased to hear it at first, but his expression soured a moment later. “Now, tell me,” he said crossly, “who can I rely on to be suitably impressed once I’ve brought it off?”

“We,” I corrected him. “You mean to say once we have -”

“Yes, naturally. But whom am I supposed to gloat to if you’ve been in on it all along?”

I was appalled. “Is that really the reason you never tell me anything?”

“No, not the principal one. Though it is a substantial perquisite.” He paused. “I do tell you some things,” he said, but if he wished me to believe him, he might have addressed that part of the question first. “There will always be things I can’t have you knowing about. It’s not a referendum on your character.”

I thought I followed. He meant that he would not be extending me this courtesy again. Though I might have hoped differently, I had known better than to expect as much. It had been a long day, I was tired, and I had achieved some measure of success already, and thus did not press the issue. I suspect, too, that I was too disheartened by this turn of events to have made a good showing of it in any case.

“If you insist,” I said wearily. “But know this. If you ever abandon me to MacKenzie again, I shall … I shall strangle you until you are _very sorry.”_


End file.
